


The Princess and the Elf

by aldersprig, DetectiveInspector_Caracal



Category: Addergoole Series - Lyn Thorne-Alder
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Faeries - Freeform, Gen, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Romance, Princess/Knight dynamics, References to Arthurian Legend, Teenagers, Well really THEY are the faeries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 23:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 13,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15423672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aldersprig/pseuds/aldersprig, https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveInspector_Caracal/pseuds/DetectiveInspector_Caracal
Summary: Year Six: How things might've gone, if things hadn't gone the worst way possible.A much lighter AU-treatment of a couple characters from Addergoole: A Ghost Story, where Cynara's dad successfully hid and Leofric got dumped. (Because who says you can't write fanfic of your own stories? )





	1. Castles

**Cynara**

They had stopped long enough that she’d gotten enrolled in school, this time, and Cynara didn’t know whether to be happy or upset about that.

On the one hand, that meant that they were going to be in one place long enough to get to know the lay of the land and all the ways in and out of everywhere; on the other hand, it meant that she had to go through the whole process of being the new kid in school yet again.

Thus, she was putting the process off as long as possible by skipping her first day of class.  By tomorrow or at the latest by next week, either her father or a truant officer would have figured it out and she’d be dragged off to another building full of strangers.  But that was tomorrow. Today, her father was on a job - a legit one, from the sounds of it - and she was sitting on the playground, on one of the old wooden castle structures, trying to feel like something wasn’t just a little off in the world.

Since August, her father had been a little squirrelier than usual, looking over his shoulder and moving them all over the place - like they were on the run, but without any crimes to back it up.

Now, now that it was winter, at least winter in other places, they were down in Tennessee, working a legit job and planning to stay for six months.

He wasn’t looking any less squirrely, but now it was the look he got when he’d figured out a path around something.  But this time, there were no lessons, no explanations. Nothing but a look like he’d finally found something he was looking for and the most rickety house they’d ever stayed in.

She wondered if he thought she didn’t notice him walking around the border of the property at night, wearing a path in the weeds and muttering under his breath.  She wondered if he was going to tell her what her role was supposed to be, when the cops finally showed up.

That was for later.  She laid back on the wood of the playground and engaged in one of her favorite games of what-if.  

_What if this was a real castle and I was its Lady?  What if I had knights, and, I suppose, ladies-in-waiting, and nobody could ever take me away from here?_


	2. Wandering

**Leofric**

He was supposed to go back.

Christmas vacation had started out terribly, the break in classes leaving him either alone in his room or wandering the halls being reminded of _her_ everywhere he went. Then Leofric had remembered that "vacation" usually meant "going somewhere else", so he'd asked Luke for permission and gone home.

Home was a little better, leaving him either alone in his room or wandering the city, which at least had no reminders of the past months, until he'd wandered by the train station and had the best idea he'd had in... well, since he'd started school back in September.  Leofric promptly acted on the idea, withdrew a bunch of cash from his mom's account at the ATM, used the card to buy a train ticket, and gone south.

The ticket was good through to Louisiana, but on a whim and an urge to make himself as hard to find as possible, he got off in Virginia... and started walking.

 _That_ had been two weeks ago. Two weeks of walking across the Appalachians in January, passing through one town after another, and alternating between crashing at cheap motels and using his magic to make camping out survivable. It was tough. It was an _adventure_. It took his mind off what amounted to his first, only, and awful break-up, and not only that, it was the most fun he'd had in his whole life.

Still, he was supposed to go back.

Leofric _knew_ this, knew he didn’t really have a choice, but he couldn't really bring himself to go through with it himself, not when this combination of playing hooky and being on the run was so much fun. They'd come find him eventually; he didn't feel like making their jobs any easier. (Besides, Luke could probably use the break himself, getting out of the school and looking for him.)

At that moment on that day, Leofric was strolling through a quiet residential district, looking for a place to grab some lunch. He'd left the real mountains behind some time before but he was pretty sure he was still in Tennessee, like the last town had been. This one, judging from the houses, was a pretty nice town - maybe even a city. Definitely big enough to have a mostly-bug-free motel and some cheap food places that weren't McD's.

A flicker of movement in the otherwise silent neighborhood caught the corner of his eye and he looked over towards the playground. Big, wooden, with lots of things to climb: the kind he would've loved as a kid. And it looked like someone was lying down at the top, judging from the shoes he could see at the edge.

Leofric found himself slowing to a halt, looking around. He'd had a couple not-so-great run-ins with small town strangers... but this was a public playground in a much bigger town. And no one else was around. And they might be _in_ trouble. ( _And_ he had a knife and knew how to use it.)

 _What the hell,_ he thought, grinning. _Adventure awaits._

He headed over towards the playground, circling the tower once before climbing up the side. Lying on top was a girl, maybe his age, with bright red hair and her eyes closed, dressed way too nicely and too clean to be homeless or a fellow runaway.

Somehow, she didn't seem to notice he'd come over. _Sleeping, maybe?_

"Hey. You okay?"

The girl immediately opened her eyes and sat up. "Yes, thank you."

 _Not sleeping, just ignoring me._ "Good to hear. Mind if I join you?"

She shook her head, so he climbed up the rest of the way and sat down next to her. "What's your name?"

"Cynara. My dad and I just moved into town."

"Cynara, huh? I'm Leofric." He held out a hand to shake and considered making a joke about weird names, but he really didn't want to talk about anything related to school. Well, not to _his_ school, but he was pretty sure she was supposed to be at _hers_. "What's a nice girl like you doing in an empty playground like this?" Leofric gave her a broad grin, hoping she'd get the joke and not think he was some kind of creepy weirdo.

"Skipping school?" She wasn't moving away, at least, which he took as a good sign. "What about you?"

"Looking for a place to grab lunch. I just got into town, myself. Want to join me?"


	3. Lunch Date

**Cynara**

Cynara had heard someone coming up on her, but she hadn’t bothered to care - she wasn’t doing anything wrong, except skipping school, and looking guilty about that wouldn’t help her case at all — until they spoke.

Then she sat up, quickly, possibly too quickly.

There was a boy.  Talking to her.

He looked, she thought, as she looked him over quickly, like a runaway, but not one that had been running long.  His clothes showed wear, but his skin looked healthy and the strands of blond hair sticking out of his hoodie looked relatively clean.

“Looking for a place to grab lunch. Want to join me?” he offered.

Cya blinked twice, considered her funds — better than they ought to be, and she’d leave it at that — and considered his friendly and earnest face.  “Sure. We can find out what’s not awful in town together.”

Despite the corny almost-a-come-on-line, she was ninety-five percent sure he wasn’t hitting on her, which was a pity, because he was absolutely gorgeous.  Those eyes, that expression....

And hadn’t that been how she’d gotten in trouble in her last school, muttering about the wrong guy being hot?  She looked away for a moment, mustered an excuse — “I don’t think my dad will be home for hours,” she told him honestly, gesturing vaguely in the direction she’d been looking — and found her feet.  “Although I think traditionally I’m supposed to elicit some sort of toll or something for this?”

He laughed, which was what she’d been hoping for, and countered with “up in a tower? You should’ve let down your hair,” which was, all things considered, not quite what she’d been hoping for.

Or, not to put too fine a point on it, she’d been hoping for that sort of thing for years, but she was a realist.  It might be her castle, but nobody was going to come rescue her.

“I’ll have to go get some extensions.  Or maybe just work on growing it out for a while.”  She gestured across the rickety bridge. “Shall we? I hear the next kingdom over actually has a tolerably good sandwich shop.”

“After you, my lady.”  His gesture was deeper and more fancy than hers.  Cynara thought she might die a little bit if he kept this up.

“So kind.”  She made a little faux-curtsey with a skirt she didn’t have. “So what brings you here?” She hopped across the bridge and slid down the slide as if she was five again and these things were new.  If she was going to play hooky, she might as well enjoy it, right?


	4. Knights and Princesses

**Leofric**

Leofric focused on his footing as he crossed the bridge, glad it was just wobbly enough to make it believable and give him a moment. Stupid, he was _stupid_ , getting caught up in this knight-meets-princess thing again like he hadn’t learned _anything_ this past semester.

He didn’t want to think about it... He didn’t _have_ to think about it. He was talking to a perfectly normal human teenage girl, there was no harm in playing a little court manners with her, right? It was fine.

“Just passing through, really.” He slid down the pole instead of the slide - and, taking one look at her expression, held up his hands to stop the polite acceptance of his dodge he could see coming. “No, no, I’ll tell you... but you have to promise me you won’t call the cops.”

Fifty percent of the time, that’d get them to call the cops on his terms and he could get a head start on running. Forty percent of the time, that got him a doubtful look, like _what could this nice, skinny kid be up to that’d bring in the police?_ (Nothing, of course, but he wouldn’t believe for a minute that Addergoole didn’t have access to some kind of national runaways database, and that’s what the police would file him as.) And the last ten percent were the tricky ones, the ones who acted sympathetic and tried to keep him in one place by buying him lunch or something while they waited for the cops to show.

Cynara, on the other hand… Well, she didn’t look like any of those things, which was intriguing. In fact, he couldn’t figure out the look she’d just given him at all, which was _really_ intriguing - and kind of unsettling. _If she winds up being a cop’s daughter..._

“I won’t call the cops,” she assured him. “Besides, they would take me back to school.”

“Point taken.” He smiled again, letting himself relax a little, and stuck his hands in his pockets as he fell in step next to her. “So… well. To be honest, I’m kind of doing a bigger version of what you’re doing, really.”

“Playing hooky?” She raised an eyebrow at him, the expression just enough at odds with her overall shyness that with the bit on the tower, he couldn’t help interpret it as regal. _Damnit._

_Japanese must have a name for this. Princess complex or something._

“Kind of.” He cleared his throat, feeling awkward all of the sudden. “I went back home for Christmas, you know? But instead of going back to school, I got on a train going the other way, took it a while and then hit the road. So here I am.”

“That sounds more like running away than playing hooky.”

“Little of column A, little of column B.” Leofric shrugged. “Runaways get reported by their parents, you know? I doubt my mom cares.”

“I’m sorry.” The apology was so meticulously polite that Leofric was convinced she didn’t mean a single syllable of it. “But the school does?”

“Well, it’s…”

Leofric had been a lousy liar his whole life, which had gotten him into hot water more times than he could count. People seemed to recognize a lie of his before he’d even finished the sentence.

But finally, during a few tight spots in the past couple weeks, he’d figured out a trick: if you say things that are completely true, but you pick just the right parts to say or leave out, you could make people _think_ you meant something different without ever getting caught at a lie. Tell someone you’re hiking through the mountains, taking a break from school, and besides you haven’t picked a college yet? They’ll think you graduated high school and are on some kind of hippy soul-searching journey.

In _this_ case, he was taking the full, fantastical truth of an underground boarding school slash experimental facility that magically bound demi-human fairy teens to attendance and picking the parts of the truth that would, hopefully, make Cynara believe he meant something nice and mundane and real. Like, say, a disciplinary school for problem teens. Those were real, he was pretty sure - and as a bonus, not the kind of place you want to admit you went, making the hedging not so suspicious.

“...a special school,” he continued. “A special kind of boarding school that takes attendance _really_ seriously. They’ll track me down sooner or later but I figure hey, why not enjoy the freedom while I can?” He looked over at her through the corner of his eye, assessing her reaction and ready to bolt if she pulled out a phone. Assurance or not.


	5. Quest

**Cynara**

_A special school_.  Cynara raised her eyebrows at him, watching his reaction, the way he was waiting for her to freak out.

She wondered if _he’d_ freak out if he knew what her father did for a living most of the time.

Or the extracurricular stuff.

Or some of the people he’d pissed off over the years.

“Sounds fun,” she said, because, let’s face it, it did.  “Just hopped a train and, well, went? That sounds pretty awesome.”  She made a gesture she hoped was as reassuring as she meant it to be.  “Relax. you’re the first person to talk to me so far in this town, and I am not going to call the cops on someone who’s being nice to me.”

 _Cynara,_ she scholded herself, _that sounds like a threat.  Be nice or else_.

Too late for that, now.  She put a smile on it and made a show of looking around.  “So, let’s see. If I were a sandwich shop, I thiiiink that I would probably be in…”  She spun around and pointed. “That direction.

She’d always been good at finding her way around places.  She attributed it to the way they moved every few months, every few weeks in a bad year.  If she couldn’t find the grocery store in a completely strange town, she’d long ago have starved, or at least withered away from motel-vending-machine malnutrition.

“Sounds good,” Leofric agreed cheerfully.  She had never met a runaway as _perky_ as him; it made her wonder about this “special school” even more.

Not her business, and, as her father liked to say: “Everyone has a secret.  The trick is to always pretend you don’t know that. Eventually, it will come out.”

They headed in the direction she’d indicated and, after a moment’s thought, Cynara offered, playfully “If this is a quest, since we started at the castle and all, then, well, let’s see.  We’re going to provision and then we’ll have to go search something out. I happen to know a perfectly serviceable haunted house on the edge of town.”

He raised his eyebrows and for a second her heart sank.   _This is why you don’t have any friends, Cynara._  “Haunted?”

“Well, okay, that’s the rumor.  I haven’t seen hide nor hair of any ghosts -” and with the wards her father had put up, any ghosts were probably either trapped in the downstairs broom closet or stuck out in the old rickety shed “-but I am a little short on foreign invaders to fight, unless that’s us, and I haven’t seen any evil Chancellors or monsters, unless you count the really grumpy lady at the post office.  So I’m afraid that it’s a haunted house or it’s up to you to come up with the quest.”

"Oh, no, I wouldn't dream of it. If your ladyship wants to go on a quest to a haunted house, who am I to disagree?" His smile was a little cautious, this time, but there was a spark in his eyes.

Cynara let herself smile.  More than smile, and far less cautious than his expression.  “Well, then, Sir Leofric, we should provision for our quest!”

What, was she ten?

And if she was, why not? She certainly hadn’t had this much fun since she had been!


	6. Slip of the Tongue

**Leofric**

_Sir Leofric._

Leofric realized he was grinning and hoped it wasn't as stupid-looking an expression as he felt. He was playing a _game of make-believe_ with a pretty girl he'd just met. That was it, it was all pretend. There were no ghosts, no dangers, no valiant battles in her defense. Just sandwiches, a probably-abandoned house and a fun afternoon before he moved on. Nothing _serious_. Definitely nothing to get all stupid over, acting like some cartoon character guy who’d just seen Jessica Rabbit.

Now if his heart rate could just get the memo and slow the hell down instead of racing like a nervy deer into traffic....

_What were we... Provisions, right._ "A meal at the local inn," he suggested. "The innkeep will never recognize you as the princess with your disguise, so there is little risk of His Majesty being alerted to our quest and confining you to your room."

"Is that what he's been doing?" She was _smiling_ , the shy stiffness softening away and making her a hundred times prettier as she got into the part. "Then I suppose we should avoid the guards, too. Just in case."

"A wise decision.  Especially the royal guards, since they're familiar with your face - and mine."

A small corner of Leofric's mind observed that if he were into girls at all beyond this complex - this _hime-con_ thing - he'd already be halfway to falling in love. _Twitterpated,_ he thought as the scene from Bambi popped into his head. _Well, that's uncomfortably appropriate._

"They would know such a distinguished member of their ranks on sight," she agreed.

"Nay, my lady," he found himself correcting, "I am not the _king's_ knight, I'm yours."

_Shit!_

Leofric caught the words a moment too late and nearly had a heart attack. Whatever the impulse was that possessed him to make such an _asinine_ mistake, he was lucky this wasn't back at school. He might as well just hand himself out on a silver platter!

If he didn't manage to do something about this inability to _think first_ by the time he graduated and got his Name, he was going to wind up Belonging to some strange woman before he was thirty.

"Oh," he added, changing the subject in a hasty attempt to cover his sudden flustered nerves, "I think we're nearing the edge of the residential area" - and to his relief, peering up ahead showed they really _were_ nearing the edge and he hadn't just made an even bigger ass of himself.


	7. My Knight

**Cynara**

_“I am not the_ _king’s_ _knight, I'm yours."_

For a split second, Cynara’s heart stopped.   _Yes.  Yes, that is what I want?  How did I not know that was-_

Leofric’s face was doing something that looked like he was trying to take back everything he’d said, and he changed the subject faster than her dad took hairpin turns in a borrowed car.

“I think we’re nearing the edge of the residential area.”

“Oh, it looks like it.”  She made something like a smile happen on her lips.  “Then surely there will be some sort of sustenance ahead - ah-ha.”  She dropped the act for a moment and looked at him more seriously. “If there’s going to be some sort of Amber Alert or something out on you, we should do like, take-out or something where they don’t see your face for long.  Sub shop?”

“I don’t think the police are looking for me,” he demurred.  

“Subs anyway?” she countered.  “My treat.” She held up her hand.  “I have an allowance. It’s stupid but I have it.  And since I have no other friends in the area-” _or anywhere “-_ to spend it on, I want to spend it on you.”

“I should save my own money,” he admitted, much to her relief. “And a real sandwich would be nice… Besides, how can I say no to an offer like that?”  The lopsided smile he added to the last part made Cya’s stomach do something weird.

“Well, I’m sure you could manage to say no,” she joked.  “The question is: how would I take it? I mean, normally - well, okay, people say no to me all the time,” she admitted.  “And I just wander off and sulk and hang out in my castle.”

She gestured back in the direction of the playground.  “Although I have to admit, this town has a much better castle than most places I’ve been.”  She stepped up to the door of the sub shop and, she realized, waited for him to hold the door the way she would with someone four or five (or six, or with her father’s sometimes-friend, ten or twelve) times her age.

He didn’t disappoint her.  She stepped in, her smile feeling real again.  “I think that when I’m a billionaire, I’m going to build a proper castle,” she decided.


	8. Camelot

**Leofric**

Cynara had barely noticed his huge verbal stumble at all - or at least acted like she hadn't, which he decided to chalk up to politeness instead of obliviousness. And as he let the shop door close behind him, he found himself picturing her standing at the ramparts of a real castle, looking out over her domain, and couldn't help a grin.

"It's gotta be one of those old German-style ones,” he said, “set up on top of a mountain. A fairy tale castle for a fairy tale princess."

"I was picturing it more like Camelot," she admitted. "King Arthur, knights of the round table--"

"And you Queen Guenivere?" He looked over at her vividly-dyed red hair, thought about what happened to Guenivere in the stories, and decided a change of topic was in order. "Actually, uh, I need a minute to decide what I want."

"Okay, take your time." She accepted the shift like it was totally normal.

He studied the menu board, putting aside the unpleasant topic of tragic romances and instead weighing the cost of each sandwich against how filling it sounded. These past couple weeks and his shrinking cash reserves had really made him realize just how much everything cost.

"Roast beef and cheese," he told the cashier. "And a fountain drink."

"I'll have a turkey sub with swiss," Cynara said, then waited as the cashier rang up their order.

He started reaching into his pocket for his wallet, then shifted the gesture into just putting his hands in his pockets again as he remembered.

_"Since I have no other friends in the area to spend it on, I want to spend it on you."_

Leofric wondered if she knew just how desperately lonely that had made her sound. He also wondered just how lonely she must _be_ , counting a runaway stranger like himself as a friend, just because, what, he'd been nice to her and played along with her game? And he was starting to wonder how long he could keep this up before his conscience started nagging him about taking advantage of emotional vulnerability.

He deliberately was _not_ wondering how she would feel when he moved on tomorrow morning.

"I don't think I'll ever be a billionaire," Leofric said, picking up the earlier conversation again, "even if I win half a dozen lotteries. But I want to run a dojo someday."

"A dojo? You take... karate?"

He felt a little thrill of surprise that she knew what a dojo was, even if she had guessed the wrong martial art. "Kendo, actually; Japanese sword fighting. I'm going to take my sandan exam this summer - that's third level, out of eight."

"I suppose that means you're more of a samurai than a knight." Cynara smiled at him, and he tried to will his heartbeat into calming down again. "Maybe I can build you a dojo in my castle."

For a brief moment, Leofric let himself think about it, like it might be a real thing that could happen: the lady in her castle, her loyal samurai-knight in his dojo. But only for a moment before reality settled back in. Even if Cynara did someday become a billionaire and build a castle, _he'd_ have been reduced to an entertaining anecdote in her past, at most. And he’d probably have forgotten her.

"Crazier things have happened," he agreed.


	9. If, Perchance...

**Cynara**

It wasn’t even grasping at straws. That would suggest there was something, however small, to grasp at.  Cynara didn’t have that.

What she had, instead, was a runaway from some sort of very secure school, a cute guy who studied kendo and didn’t think she was weird — or was too polite to tell her he thought she was weird — for playing make-believe when she was old enough to know better.

Someone who was willing to play along, even, to let her buy lunch without an argument.  That — that wasn’t a friend, as far as she knew. It certainly wasn’t someone who would stick around and storm imaginary castles with her for any length of time.

She refused to care.  She ordered her sub and noticed he didn’t care that she ordered as much food as he did.  Then again, she was pretty sure he had no _interest_ in her.

People didn’t.  They sometimes looked like they might, until she talked too much.

She thought he might even know what color her eyes were, and not the hue of the lace on her bra that you could see from exactly the right angle.

_Crazier things have happened._

“Well.”  If they were going to suggest it might happen, then why not assume it _would_ happen?  “If… If I manage the castle, and manage to find you again, and you still want a dojo, then I’m going to say it’s a done deal.”  She winked at him playfully and held out his hand. “You can have a dojo as long as you visit it once in a while. Deal?”

“If you’re going to go to all the work of building me a dojo, the least I can do is visit.  Deal.” He shook her hand.

She remembered to let go before the touch went on too long, aided by the sub shop lady asking if she wanted pickles on her sub.

Having turned down pickles and said yes to mustard, she took her sub and gestured outward, since Leofric’s had come first.  “There’s a little picnic area on the way to the haunted house,” she informed him. “Not nearly as cool as my castle, but it suits the needs of the moment.”

_The needs of the moment_?  She sounded, once again, like she’d eaten a book for dinner.  She winced, but her guest didn’t seem to mind. “Lead on” was all he said.  So she did.

“We move a lot,” she said, apropos of nothing, as they settled into the tiny park-like area’s single sad picnic table.  It was off the beaten path, at last, and she wasn’t even sure that the truant cops were looking for her.

Or him.

“I mean…”  Why was she telling him this?  She sort of brushed off her train of thought and tried again from a slightly different direction. “What you’re doing, travelling around, that sounds fun.  Not just like, going to a new school because your dad rented a house this time. But making your own decisions. Making your own path.”

She stuffed her mouth full of sandwich before she could say anything else stupid.  


	10. Just Pretend

**Leofric**

_My own decisions, huh_.

Leofric slowly chewed on a bite of his sandwich, then realized he was kind of staring at Cynara while he thought and looked down at the table. Is _that_ what he was doing out here? Overcompensating for not being able to make his own choices? He’d thought it was just a literal way of avoiding his problems, but maybe...

"Yeah," he answered slowly. "Yeah, I think that's why I'm doing it. Running away, I mean, even if it is just a pretend kind of running away."

"So..." It sounded like she wasn't exactly sure how to respond. "What would _real_ running away look like?"

"Risky, for one thing." He glanced back up at her with a smile, although it came out kind of crooked. "It's not like I'm gonna get away for real, so I don't have to worry about running out of money, or wearing holes through my shoes or catching the flu while out on the street. It's just... it's just a game, seeing how long I can keep going before they catch up. Pretending I can decide about my life for myself."

"It still sounds a lot more like making your own decisions than just pretending to have a castle. I mean... it sounds fun? Even if it is a game?" Cynara looked uncomfortably awkwardly and took another large bite of her sub.

Leofric knew _that_ tactic for not saying something stupid too well to miss it, especially not a second time, so he gave her a reassuring smile. "It's been tons of fun," he agreed, then an idea struck him and he felt his smile widen to a grin. "Especially since I got here."

"Mm?" she asked around her sandwich.

"Well, a wandering knight is usually on a quest, you know, and now I have one, and a beautiful princess to boot."

Her expression said a surprised _oh_ , even if it was still another moment before she finished eating. “Or at least a pretend one,” she amended, “which I suppose is better than no princess at all.”

“You make a better pretend princess than all the real ones I’ve met, and definitely a prettier one.” He shot her a wink - and then his common sense caught up with the rest of him.

_What the hell, Leofric?_ Was he seriously _hitting_ on her? First he let her spend money on him in some kind of sad bid for friendship, now he was hitting on her like he wasn’t some kind of half-assed gay boy who would get her hopes up for nothing--

Cynara was blushing, just a little, and Leofric thought about just how much help his guilty conscience had been _last_ time and told it to shut the hell up.

The worst thing he figured could happen here is he’d leave her heartbroken instead of cheered up - which sucked, but it wasn’t the end of the world for either of them. The best, he’d leave her with a bunch of pleasant memories and feeling just a little bit less alone. And he’d just said he wanted risks to make this feel real, hadn’t he?

_But… oh, screw it._ This was probably the only chance he would _ever_ get to play any kind of knight to a lady - and if he had to pretend it was all just a game to give it a shot, then so be it.

"Besides.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and decided to go all in. “If I agree that you're not a princess, then I don't get to be your knight, and where's the fun in that?"


	11. Chapter 11

**Cynara**

_He had called her a princess_.

He had called her a _beautiful_ princess.

He had - she was fairly certain he wasn’t trying to sleep with her.

He had called her pretty _after_ she had gone off about castles.

She spent a minute chewing on her sub.  She was fairly certain this wasn’t a dream.  It didn’t have the super-weird feel of the ones that made her father mutter more around the house, and it didn’t have the sweeping-her-off-her-feet like some Hallmark Movie, or the deep kisses that her dreams always sort of glazed over because the only kisses she’d had were sad, sloppy, gropey things.

“I think we agreed,” she managed, looking up at him with an expression she hoped looked playful, “that you were a samurai.  Sorry; my Japanese is limited to, uh, _domo arigato_ and _konnichiwa._  But if you want to be my samurai, I am certainly not going to say no.”  She let her smile go soft, because why not be honest with someone who was going away in a day or two.  “I’ve always wanted someone to want to be my knight.”

“Then it’s decided.”  He managed to make something like a bow look reasonable - more than reasonable, gorgeous - from a sitting position.  “Ohime-sama, I am your samurai.”

The feeling that washed over her was so ridiculously strong, Cynara almost missed the look on his face, the moment like he’d just said something really stupid.

She smiled anyway and wished that she had paid more attention to the formalities of such things.  “I don’t have a sword to knight you with…” she offered uncertainly instead “So I guess we’ll have to make up our own thing.  Ah. Ahem.” She thought fast. “Welcome to the quest of the Haunted House and the mystery of the Strange City, Leofric. We accept your ser - your devo - your commitment as our samurai.”  She nodded her head solemnly just an inch, the way that the Queen might on TV and picked up what was left of his sub in its wrapper. “Accept these provisions as token of our appreciation.”

Oh dear lord, she’d gone over the top.  He was going to run away screaming before he even finished her sub.

And she was holding her breath.  What was wrong with her?

He stared at her for a moment before standing up.  She didn’t release her breath. He was going to _leave_.  Damnit!

He came around to her side of the table and knelt on one knee, like something of of a fairy tale.  Like something out of her dreams. He held out one hand. He was holding out a hand for the _sandwich_.

"I am honored by your highness' generosity. I hope my serv... um, assistance, fulfills your expectations."

She set the sandwich in his hand, trying to ignore how her hand was shaking.

“I can’t imagine how you could do anything but exceed my expectations, Sir Leofric.”  He was still kneeling. There was supposed to be…. “Rise, and join my quest.”


	12. Carried Away

**Leofric**

He stood.

Of _course_ he stood. How could he do anything else, after she’d… Leofric might’ve made the decision to go whole-heartedly for the samurai-knight thing, but he hadn’t expected _her_ to take it so seriously.

Then again, maybe he was just being naive and overly optimistic - again - and reading into things that weren’t there. Maybe she was an amateur actress and just liked getting into the part. Maybe she just read a lot of stories about knights and castles and King Arthur. Except… well, he’d caught the parts she’d censored out. _Service_ , and _devotion_. If it was _just_ an act, she wouldn’t have backed out like that, like she was second-guessing herself. Would she?

_You’re being an idiot, Leofric_. Overanalyzing her motives wasn’t going to do any good. It definitely hadn’t done any good with anyone else. What he needed to do was just take what she said and did at face value and go with it. Leave the mind-reading to the math professor.

He still had half of a sandwich left to eat, but it didn’t seem right to just sit down and start eating again after that… whatever it was. There was an urge at the back of his mind to ask permission, but he knew where _that_ was coming from and staunchly ignored it.

“I, um.” He cleared his throat and gestured with the sandwich. “I guess we should finish eating, first? Before starting on the quest.”

“Yeah… yes. Sorry. I might have gotten a little carried away...”

_If_ _she_ _got carried away, then I got swept off and over a waterfall._ “I’m pretty sure _you_ weren’t the one kneeling on the ground just now.” He pulled out a smile and sat down at the table again - next to her, this time, although he couldn’t decide if it was just from convenience or a deliberate choice.

"Well, no."  She smiled playfully back.  "I don't think the princess is supposed to do the kneeling, is she?"

“Oh. Um. No.” That had been a pretty dumb thing to say, hadn’t it. Leofric paid more attention to unwrapping more of his sandwich than it really needed, feeling heat rising in his cheeks and hoping he wasn’t _actually_ blushing. “That’s definitely my job. I mean. The knight’s job. Well, not _job_. Position?” That was way more literal than he’d been aiming for - not to mention, it seemed like all his improvised knightly manners had decided to take a vacation and leave him stumbling over basic sentences.

He coughed, since he was pretty sure any attempt at a laugh would come out _horribly_ right then, and decided to take a page from her book and eat his sandwich to shut himself up.


	13. Chapter 13

**Cynara**

Cynara thought she’d caught a hint of a blush on Leofric’s cheeks, and she didn’t know whether she should be cheered or worried about that.  She was - carried away might not be the right word. She was _immersed_.  She wanted to believe it was real.  She wanted to believe _he_ thought it was real.  She wanted ...

...she wanted this cute guy to be her samurai in a way she’d never really wanted anyone to, for instance, be her boyfriend.  She wanted him to kneel like that for her. She wanted to have actual quests for him to go on. She wanted to buy him - _make him_ dinner every day.

Yeah.  Yeah, she was getting really carried away.  She focused on her not-all-that-bad sandwich and tried not to look up at him, or to wonder exactly _why_ he’d been blushing.

“Job,” she considered, after a moment.  “I think ‘position’ is right.” She wiped her fingers and her mouth meticulously to avoid the momentary thoughts of _kneeling.  Kneeling is a good position_.  “Clearly I should have spent a little more time reading up on these things, but if we run into each other again, I’ll try to have done my research.”  She winked at him and hoped she sounded lighthearted enough. “I mean, if you are my knight, am I supposed to give you some sort of stipend? Room and board?  A lifetime supply of sub-shop sandwiches?” She glanced at him thoughtfully. “Someone to mend the hems of your pants? That seems very mundane. I suppose that’s why the Arthurian stuff never goes into the nitty-gritty.”  She folded the sub wrapper very carefully, trying to shut herself up.

Any minute now, he was going to realize that she was like this _all the time_.  

“Well, if I was - that is.  I think the daimyo would give the samurai lands and, um, money.  Not that I’m asking you for money,” he added hastily, so hastily that Cynara had to smile.

“To be honest, I think if this was a scam for money, one, you probably would have picked someone a little older, and two, your random chance of finding someone who just happened to want to live in a castle with her own knights - or samurai - was pretty slim, and you probably would have gone with a slightly more likely tack.  I know a few,” she added, and the did her best not to slap her hand over her mouth. “Daytime TV,” she added, as sort of a lame explanation. “You’d be surprised what they’ll put on Lifetime when they think nobody is watching… we have a quest.” She stood up abruptly, hoping maybe, just maybe, she might be able to shut herself up.  “We are, ah. Our quest lies to the north, to the edge of town, where none but the bravest dare go. Or so I’ve been told,” she added with a faint smirk. “I’m not all that brave, but I have been there three times already, all on my own.”

Or with her father there, but _fathers_ weren’t exactly an interesting part of quests.

“Perhaps you,” she added, “sir Samurai, can help me find the ghost that haunts the premises.”


	14. Gestures

**Leofric**

Leofric quickly finished off the last of his sandwich and crumpled the wrapper as Cynara stood, scrambling to his feet. He managed to do it without looking _too_ hasty or awkward, which he was quietly pleased about. After all, gracefully rising to your feet when the lady (or lord) stood was one of the most basic skills for this kind of thing, wasn’t it?

“I can’t say I’m much good at hunting ghosts--” He broke off and cleared his throat, searching for the right speech patterns again. _Formality, confidence, and the highest respect for the lady._ He was doing so well at it _before_ , he was sure he could do it again. “That is, um. I will strive to do so, your highness, although I am not the most experienced in ghost-hunting.”

“I have complete faith in your abilities,” she assured him with a small smile. “Shall we go, then?”

“I am ready whenever you are, your highness. And,” he added on an impulse, “you can rest assured, whatever dangers may lie ahead - ghostly or otherwise - nothing will harm you while I am here.” He gave her a deep bow - and it wasn’t the most _samurai_ of gestures, but he couldn’t help adding a flourish to the gesture. She seemed to like the fancy gestures and phrases the most.

The smile on her face when he straightened back up showed that he’d made the right call, and it was tough to keep an appropriately solemn expression as he gestured in a vaguely northward direction. “Lead on, brave lady. And maybe,” he added, letting a grin slip through, “we can compare notes about scam artists versus opportunists along the way?”

“I don’t know anything that interesting about it,” Cynara hedged as they started walking. “Just some things I saw on TV, like I said.”

“That’s fine - not that we _have_ to,” he added quickly. “But, um… We have a long journey ahead, and some conversation may help to pass the time along the way? I don’t know much about scam artists,” he continued, slipping back more to the way he usually spoke, “but I have a lot of… well.” Leofric trailed off as the realization struck him: maybe talking about opportunism wasn’t actually a great topic. Especially considering what _kind_ of opportunism most of his personal experiences were.

He couldn’t exactly discuss methods his classmates used to trick people into a Keeping, after all. And besides, part of him was hoping she’d go onto another small tangent again, like the one about hems. It made the whole thing - it made _her_ more real, reminded him that she was someone with their own life and interests, not just a princess in a fairy tale castle. He would’ve thought the opposite before, but it helped ease off the pressure in the back of his mind to do everything _perfectly_.

...the rest of him, he was finding, just liked to listen to her talk about things.

“I guess we could just talk about something else,” he tried. “Hobbies? Extracurriculars? Stuff like how I practice kendo. What about you, what do you do?”


	15. Hobby Horse

__**Cynara**

For a minute, Cynara thought she’d misheard him.

For a minute before then, she thought that he was some particularly baby-faced FBI agent trying to get information on her father’s most interesting… _jobs_.  That was, she thought, probably legal, and it would explain why he was willing to play along with her little fantasy.  It would explain almost everything, she thought.

But then he’d changed the subject.   _Hobbies._  Cynara considered that for a minute.

He probably didn’t want to know about making sure she had everything she might need in a bag or a box to leave at any moment.  That probably wasn’t considered a hobby by most sane people. She remembered when she’d tried to explain that to a classmate, who wanted to know how they moved so quickly.  

_Easy_ , she’d said, _you never unpack anything you can’t live without.  And you get really good at packing what you need._

Being prepared for every instance and thinking up new instances to be prepared for was not the sort of hobby most people understood.

_But if it starts to rain and I haven’t put everything in covered notebooks, then my homework will get soaked.  So I have a waterproof backpack..._

She cleared her throat.  “I like woodworking. I’m sort of hampered by the lack of tools, and most schools - when I bother to go, I suppose - won’t let you just make up projects in shop class.  But I’ve been working on a couple travel chests.”

She glanced up at him.  He didn’t seem to be mortified; he actually looked kind of interested.  "Like for luggage and stuff? Those are pretty big projects.” He didn’t just sound _interested,_  she thought — although she could be just making stuff up to make herself feel better — that he sounded impressed.

“It makes it easier, when we move again.  And, ah, prettier. Tidier. My favorite part is hidden compartments,” she admitted.  “I suppose that’s the sort of thing I shouldn’t share, but you’re my knight, after all.”  She grinned crookedly, hoping he could tell she was (mostly) joking. “If I can’t trust you with my hidden compartments, who _can_ I trust?”

And _that_ had sounded far too much like some very weird flirting.   _Dial it back, Cynara.  He’s not interested. He might even be FBI._

"Hidden compartments, really? I'd love to see those," he started, and then seemed to trip over his tongue as he realized what she had, that she had been making things far too suggestive.  "I mean, I mean the ones in your chest. ....shit."

Cya couldn’t help it; she giggled.  He was _adorable_.  “You,” she informed him, “are definitely not FBI.”

It gave him a moment to get his feet under him.  He raised his eyebrows, looking a little surprised.

Well, who wouldn’t be, when you suddenly mentioned the FBI out of nowhere?

“Is that why you move so much?" His tone was joking; his body language was mostly trying-not-to-be awkward, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his shoulders.

She was not going to make this any easier on him with her answer, was she?  Damnit. “No.” She grinned so that he could tell she was lying. “Absolutely not one bit.  Nope.” She cleared her throat and gestured like they were on a tour. “On our left here, we have the abandoned barn.  Nobody knows why it’s abandoned — or, at least, I don’t know, and nobody else has informed me — but if you wander inside, it looks as if someone just packed up and left one day.  There’s still horse tack and all sorts of things inside.”


	16. A Clue

__**Leofric**

Leofric obediently looked over towards the abandoned barn, but he wasn’t really paying much attention, his mind otherwise occupied.

She-- well, her dad, couldn’t _really_ be being chased by the FBI? It was probably just another game, like the whole questing knight thing. ...then again, she didn’t act the same about them at all. But--

“What kind of things?” It wasn’t any of his business if she was on the run. So was he, technically. Which, now that he’d thought of it, made him _more_ curious if it was true.

“Ropes, straw, dust - lots of dust. Do you want to go take a look?”

“Sure! I mean, we should investigate, in case there is something to aid us on our quest.”

“An excellent thought, Sir Leofric. Let us detour into the abandoned barn.”

“The ancient ruins,” he suggested as they started out over the field, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “A mystic temple from centuries ago. Maybe we can find some clue, or a magical artifact that will give us advantage over the rumored spirit we seek.”

“Brilliant!” There was almost a hop in Cynara’s step as she grinned at him, the enthusiasm in her expression making her look years younger.  “Yes. A clue.”

“Then a clue we will find.” Leofric offered her his arm, almost instinctively, and kept thinking aloud. “Something about its identity, maybe. A name, or a way to lure it out of hiding…”

There was a noticeable pause before she looped her arm through his, with a studied deliberation that made him think she was nervous. _Too far?_ he wondered, but it was too late to do anything about that now - not without pulling away, and _that_ would be stupid.

“Or maybe both,” she said. “The name of someone the ghost knew. Someone who they couldn’t resist coming out for when they hear the name.”

“Oh! That’s a good one.” Leofric smiled at her, and felt it widen to a grin when she smiled back. He should do this kind of thing more often--

_Oh. Right._ This was a one-off event, with a girl he’d never see again after today. Casting his mind around for a distraction from the sinking disappointment, the curiosity he’d been ignoring poked its way back up into his consciousness. _“Absolutely not one bit,”_ she’d said, with a grin that said… well, it said _joking with plausible deniability_. Which supported the idea that her family was, what was the phrase? A fugitive from justice.

It fit the rest of what he knew so far, too - not in any kind of a compelling argument, but well enough that the only thing really discounting it as true would be the likelihood of it happening. And, well. When you were a half-human magical elf hiding from your demon-winged Mentor so you didn’t have to go back to school, things like _running from the FBI_ got a lot less implausible-sounding.

“So... Cynara,” and he dropped a deliberate Significant Pause before continuing, “if that really is your name.” He winked, so she’d know he didn’t _really_ doubt it was her name. “If the FBI _were_ looking for you, what would it be for?”


	17. FBI

**Cynara**

_“If that really is your name…”_

Well, she’d asked for it.  She’d dropped all those hints.  She knew better.

Cynara smiled widely at him.  “Oh, come on. Haven’t you watched any _Law and Order?_  If I was going to change my name, I wouldn’t change it to _Cynara_.  It would be something teachers could pronounce, like Cindy or Cathy or Caylen or Cassidy or - well, anything but ‘prickly thorn bush.’”

His expression told her that he wasn’t going to be put off that easily, so she huffed, mock-annoyed, and took a moment to fuss with the barn door with her free hand.  It was tricky - or at least, that was a good enough excuse, and yet not so tricky she had to use both hands. Really. “If - _If_ \- the FBI was looking for me, which they wouldn’t be, because seriously, who changes their name to Cynara?”  Did that even make any sense? Well, it wasn’t like she expected him to believe the part about the FBI _not_ looking for her.

Weird, if she’d tried that on anyone else she’d met, they’d have assumed she was trying to get attention.

Since he had already agreed to be her knight-slash-samurai and was already paying her more attention than _anyone_ had in the last… uh… decade?  Maybe more, except the occasional police officer and truant officer, she thought maybe he really believed her and was actually interested.

“I would never admit anything, of course,” she continued, before her pause became too noticeable.  

“Of course,” he agreed.  “But if you were-”

“If they were looking, it would be mostly for my father,” she sighed.  It was so anticlimactic. “I mean, I think I - if I were running from the FBI, they might have an ‘unknown accomplice’ on the books for a few cases.  The sort of thing where nobody would ever believe it was a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl? But of course I’m not on the run from anything. Well, except the truant officer.”

“Who doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to find you,” Leo pointed out.

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure that my father remembered to enroll me,” she admitted, “and I’m not all that eager to find out.”

"I can sympathize with that." He looked around at the barn, then gave her a sidelong glance. "So, unknown accomplice? I promise your secret will be safe with me, if I ever actually get to hear it."

 _Promises are important.  Don’t accept them unless you trust the person; don’t give them ever if you can help it_.

“So, if my father was, indeed, wanted by the FBI…”  She stepped further into the barn, tugging on the arm she hadn’t released yet in encouragement.  The light streamed in through the cracks between the boards, lighting up the bits of hay in the air and the old tack still hung as if waiting for a horse to come along.  “...it would be because he’s a thief. His day job, you see, is being a securities expert — he’s very good at finding the holes in people’s security. And at being unknown when he’s not on the job.”

Magically good, but she didn’t have to mention that part.

“So sometimes, he needs — or would, when he wasn’t working on his day job, if he did such a thing — someone to act as a distraction, or to find something for him, or any number of other little jobs.  Not anything _dramatic._  I definitely like being a princess better.”

For the second time that day, unless she’d already lost count, she was holding her breath.


	18. Windows and Sunbeams

_A thief_.

Leofric could only imagine what kind of _thief_ would draw the attention of the FBI. He’d have to be an Arsène Lupin level of jewel thief or something. _Or stealing top secret government documents…_

“So you’re - sorry. You _would_ be a kind of… sidekick apprentice?” He'd honestly been starting to worry she was a drug mule or something, with the FBI and the hidden compartments, so _thief_ \- even one that might be a threat to national security - was kind of a relief. “Doing the easy parts while learning how the, um… the whole thing works?”

“You could put it that way,” she agreed. “I suppose if I was doing something like that, I’d be picking it up mostly by accident, you know, and overhearing things I’m not supposed to.”

“That’s... pretty cool. I mean, except for the hiding from the government part and maybe going to jail, but I don’t know what _kind_ of jail you go to for that. At least, not the kind of stealing the FBI’d be involved with, it’d probably be pretty terrible like any other jail but at least it might have windows, which is--” He cut himself off before he could dig himself in any deeper - or, more likely, say something he would _really_ regret. “Never mind.”

“I… I think most prisons have windows? They probably have windows somewhere, at least. Even a castle dungeon has barred windows, after all.”

“Yeah… yeah, I guess they do.” Leofric looked over at the sunlight breaking through the barn walls, lighting up the dust motes in the air. There were, he’d realized, lots of things like that; little things he hadn’t known he’d missed, not until he went back home for vacation and got to have them again. Like windows. Sunbeams. Weather - the sound, the _feeling_ of rain falling. _Open spaces_.

Making a badly Worked shelter out of sticks and plant debris and sparking damp leaves for an hour until they caught on fire to keep from freezing to death were only minor inconveniences in exchange for even a fake, temporary sort of freedom, when he really thought about it.

“We’re supposed to be looking for clues?” Cynara offered, shaking Leofric from his thoughts. “For the ghost, you know. Maybe there’s a tombstone around here, or a plaque, if they had plaques back then. The ancient Romans carved words into rocks all the time, but I don’t know when they started making things like plaques with people’s names on them, that probably came a lot later....”

“Right… right.” He gave himself another mental shake and looked around, putting himself back into the game of pretend. There was a bunch of stuff that looked like it must be the “tack” Cynara had meant - a saddle, a bunch of other leather things. Some buckets and brushes. There wasn’t really anything he could interpret as-- _aha_.

“Over this way, your highness; I see something.” He led her over towards a corner, then bent down and scooped up an odd-looking tool he’d spotted hiding in the straw; some kind of hand-held hook, now covered in dirt and rust. “I believe,” he said solemnly, holding it out to her on the palm of his hand, “this is the key you have been looking for?”


	19. Preparations

**Cynara**

Leofric was holding out a piece of junk as if it was a treasure.   It looked… like a piece of rusty metal shaped into a hook.  Like something for playing pirates. Like not talking about her father’s law-breaking career.

“Why yes, you're correct!”. Cynara took the subject change with relief.  “You are not only han— brave, you're clever as well, Sir Leofric!” She smiled, trying to banish thoughts of the FBI _.  Apprentice thief._  It made it sound so much more romantic and movie-worthy than _sometimes runs illegal errands or distracts security._

“And now that we have the key, perhaps we can unravel the mystery of the haunted house!”

Why was she rushing this along?  It wasn't like he wouldn't be gone far too soon anyways.  And then she'd have to give in, go to school, and be the weird new nerd in the back of the classroom.

He seemed to be having a similar train of thought — or maybe he just really liked old barns.  She shouldn't assume he was doing more than humoring her. “I don't know. There might be more clues here somewhere.”

She looked around.  “If I was a clue…” There was an old cabinet next to the tack; it was closed with a cheap, rusty padlock.

She slipped her trusty bobby pins out of her hair — _always be prepared_ wasn't just the Boy Scout's motto, and none of them had ever had to pack a car and leave in ten minutes or less, leave no evidence and pay the desk clerk in cash — and strode over to the lock.  Sometimes other kids thought this was cool. Sometimes they thought it made her a delinquent. (Sometimes both.)

She glanced back at Leofric — _her knight!_ Or at least for a few hours of make-believe, which was more than she’d ever had a knight before - trying to find out if _he_ thought of her lock-picking skills.  Was she _showing off_?  That was even more ridiculous than flirting with him.  But, well. He’d thought her being an apprentice thief was “pretty cool.”

She smiled a bit, both at the thought and as the lock responded to her ministrations.  “Sometimes,” she explained lightly, “one has to do a little bit of work to find clues. They aren’t _all_ just lying about in the hay for clever knights to find.”  She winked at him and pried open the cabinet, wondering what she’d find.

The doors screeched so loudly as she opened them that she took a step backwards and looked around.  This place was really abandoned, right? She really had to add WD40 to her everyday carry. Now how would _that_ go over in a backpack search, she wondered.   _Miss Dayton, it appears that you have… a can of WD40, a multitool, a sewing kit, seventeen pens, a change of clothing, and - is that a tarp?_

The last time she’d had a backpack search she’d been really happy that her only penknife was hidden in a pen - one of the more useful gifts her father had given her.  Because that was _definitely_ not allowed on school grounds in any county.

“Well, it doesn’t look like we alerted the guards - or the ghost.”  She considered the cabinet with wrinkled nose. “But this may have been a distraction.”

“That must mean we’re close to something important.” He peered into the cabinet over her shoulder.  He was _tall_ , she noted, or at least tall enough to look over her shoulder without a problem.  She glanced down at her cute-and-practical boots and wished she’d worn something with a taller heel.

“Well, let us see what the distraction has to offer.  Urg. Fifty-year-old horse liniment. Work gloves. A spare bit… hrrm.  A book.” She flipped open the book, not expecting it to be anything more than some sort of horse care diary.

At first, that’s all she thought it was.  After all, this was make-believe. They weren’t really looking for clues to the haunting.  But as she flipped through the listings of horses and their care, a page with more crowded handwriting caught her eye.  She flipped back to it, frowning.

The page before had been ripped out, leaving only a few words.  - _can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, even though everything appears normal.  I’ve listened to my granny’s advice and planted hawthorn in the backyard, and there’s hawthorn and iron over all the lintels._

“Well then.”  She glanced up at Leofric, to see what he was making of this.


	20. Cold Iron

**Leofric**

Leofric was quietly trying not to panic.

A make-believe quest was fine. A game of knight-and-princess was fine, even one he kept taking way too seriously. Digging around abandoned houses for imaginary clues, that was fine too.

Finding books about _warding off faeries_ , that was… that was _not_ fine. That was taking everything straight out of imaginary games and into _real danger_. Not only that he might get hurt, but that she might _find out_ , and then… well, then he’d have to run again.

“Can I take a look?” He held out a hand to Cynara, who handed him the book, still open to the page about hawthorn and strange things happening.

A quick glance around the barn showed that yes, there it was, a horse shoe - probably iron - and a stick of wood nailed over the barn door. Fortunately for him, sticking hawthorn over windows didn’t _really_ do any good against faeries, and iron didn’t do anything at all… Which meant that whoever had been writing in the book didn’t have personal experience, not when writing it, which was a little comforting.

But he had the book, now. Flipping through it again, he skimmed it for anything else suspicious - hawthorn, rowan, demons, witches, strange phenomena... 

The word _strange_ caught his eye and he stopped. _… hearing strange sounds at night. They’ve been getting louder. I’m not sure the hawthorn and iron is going to help, but what else do we have?_

“The ghost,” he muttered to himself, then abruptly remembered Cynara standing next to him and coughed. “I mean, uh. Look, here,” he handed her back the book, “this must be about the ghost, right?”

If the haunted house rumors started back then, and people were putting up hawthorn to ward it off… They were going to break into a _faerie’s_ house looking for ghosts, weren’t they? At least no one probably lived in it anymore, considering Cynara said she’d been there a few times already… Unless they just didn’t want to be bothered and hid from humans.

But Leofric _wasn’t_ human. Maybe they’d be able to tell. Maybe they’d try to throw the Law at him and then he’d be stuck until Luke caught up with him. And _then_ he’d have to go back to school… 

He couldn’t back out now, though, not without seeming even more suspicious. He was screwed.

Cya read the line, seeming to take longer than she had with the original passage, even though it was maybe half as long.  “Yes…” she answered slowly. “Yes, that has to be about the ghost.”

“Then I guess the, uh…” _Shit_. He knew exactly what he’d say, based on this book, if he was the normal human being he was pretending to be, but he couldn’t… he wasn’t going to suggest they go look for hawthorn for _real_ , that would be like shooting himself in the foot. _Twice_.

He thought quickly, trying to figure out a compromise. “This must be the clue about this ghost’s, um, weak points that we were looking for. So we should… find something iron, to help ward it off if it attacks.” Iron was good. Iron was just a harmless metal.


	21. Chapter 21

**Cynara**

Leofric was _not_ fine with this, and he was trying to hide it - either that or he was doing a really really good job of imitating being not fine while trying to hide it, but Cynara was getting more and more sure that he was exactly what he seemed, a nice guy who happened to be a runaway from someplace not so nice.

They were playing, right?  She looked at the book again.   _Hearing strange sounds at night_.  There was more than one reason she’d said the house was haunted, after all.  She’d been trying to convince herself that it was just the creaking and settling of an old house, but what if it wasn’t?

“Iron.”  She nodded.  If a hook from a barn could be a key, then they could get some iron.  It was all a game.

If it was a game, why did Leofric look so _worried_?

It it was a game, why did _she_ feel so worried?

She swallowed and looked around.  “Okay. Iron. We’re in a stable, that ought to be easy enough.  Let’s see.” She turned around a few times, her gaze finally settling on the doorway they’d walked through.  “I guess they really _were_ worried about the fair folk.   Or they read too much Terry Pratchett and Parke Godwin, but I do that too, and I don’t hang up iron on my doorsteps.  Iron and - thorns?” She grabbed an old bucket and brought it over to the doorway to upend up. Just as she was about to step up on it, she found Leofric there, ready to lend a hand.

She found herself blushing.  Right. A game. _Her knight_.  Samurai.  Her samurai.  She swallowed a sudden surge of pleasure.

Was this what people felt like when they had a boyfriend or girlfriend?

And if so, why was it the first guy she’d met who would talk to her _without_ trying to sleep with her that made her feel like that?

“Thank you, my Samurai.”  She took the hand, tried to ignore her blush, and stepped up onto the bucket.

Her trusty multitool did a good job of pulling out the first nail holding the horseshoe in - also iron, and rusted until it was little more than a tiny spike surrounded by orange fuzz - but the second one sent her teetering on her makeshift stool until Leofric’s arm wrapped around her waist, steadying her.  “Easy there.” She thought he sounded amused, but she couldn’t take a moment to look; she almost had the nail out.

“Almost… there.”  She caught the horseshoe as it dropped and let the piece of thorny wood attached to it drop to the floor.  “There!” She turned to show it off, to find that Leofric’s hands were still steadying her.

His hands dropped; a moment later, as if remembering himself, he offered her a single hand.  She held out the horseshoe, then, suddenly, realized he meant to help her down.

“This princess thing takes some getting used to,” she muttered, mortified, and took the hand.  “Thank you, Sir Leofric, for you assistance.”

He cleared his throat.  “You’re welcome, ohime-sama.”  The look on his face was almost too much.

She held up the horseshoe.  “Now we have our Iron, our Clue, and our Key.  Let us continue on our quest. After all, we don’t want to enter the haunted house in the dark.”

And she wasn’t sure she could convince him to stay the night, quest or no quest, knight or no knight.  He was, after all, just passing through - or, rather, running through.

“Let’s continue,” he agreed.  From the look he was trying to hide, she wondered if he was really worried they’d find a ghost.

From the book she’d shoved in her back pocket, she wasn’t sure if _she_ should be worried.


	22. Practical Fantasies

**Leofric**

It took Leofric a little work to get back into the right mood, but once he’d _gotten_ it, he found it took his mind off of the hawthorn (lying there on the ground, just _waiting_ for him to step on it) and the possibility of breaking into some angry elder faerie’s house better than he might’ve expected. Don’t worry about the potentially fatal poison, don’t worry about getting squashed or held prisoner until his Mentor showed up, just focus on Cynara and playing the right role.

He’d had a brief, heart-stopping moment where he thought she was going to take down the hawthorn too, but she’d just let it fall like she didn’t care about it. She probably _didn’t_ care about it. He did his best to act like he didn’t, either, although he made sure to step around the _other_ side of the bucket when they left.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Cyn… Lady Cynara. Who are, um... Terry Pratchett? And Parke Godwin.”

“Oh!  Ah. Um.”  She flushed and looked away.  “Terry Pratchett does, hrrm, funny fantasy novels that make you think.  I don’t think his have any knights at all, but they do have some very honorable people.  And Parke Godwin did my favorite retelling of Camelot. It’s a lot more… real-feeling? If that makes any sense at all.”  She flapped a hand nervously.

_Leofric_ couldn’t help a grin. “Oh, I think I know what you mean. Things like earning wages and mending hems?”

“Things like maintaining the castle and, well, people actual _dying_ in wars, and succession, and all that stuff.”

“Oh, so like if King Arthur was a historical novel instead of a fantasy legend. Or a historical fantasy drama legend, no, that sounds stupid.” He shook his head, because it _did_ sound stupid.

She, on the other hand, was turning out to be pretty different from what he’d first thought, when she’d started playing princess off of his knight. Not so much the fantasy escapism he’d expected - princesses in stories having grand adventures and all of that - and a lot more of a surprisingly _practical_ attitude. Keeping your knight fed, keeping your castle in good repair.

Picking locks with a hairpin.

“They’re a lot like that, actually.” Cynara looked at him, just a little bit surprised. “Do you read historical novels?”

“No, not… well, kind of? There’s, um.” He cleared his throat, feeling oddly embarrassed about admitting he only really read manga to a girl his age who clearly read a _lot_. “Japanese comics, mostly, and some TV shows, a bunch of them are in that kind of direction. Most of them are pretty heavily dramatized,” he admitted, “so not really that kind of, um, practical realism you were talking about, but it was a rough period in Japanese history and the stories can get pretty dark.”

He hesitated another moment, considering whether he _really_ wanted to go there or not, then glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Neither of those books you mentioned really sound like they have a lot of faeries in them…?”


	23. Fairies

**Cynara**

Cynara wished she was better at hiding her emotions.  She blinked slowly, trying not to think about the way her father looked on the full moon, his rack of antlers - moose! -  looking like something out a particularly _northern_ fairy tale, or the times she’d seen his friends with their wild-animal ears and their wild-animal manners, days when she was supposed to stay in her room or stay late after school.

“Actually,” she managed, trying to find her voice, “both Godwin and Pratchett have fae.  They’re… they’re people, in Godwin; Morganna is fae. But they’re people who have magic, and Arthur has some of that magic.  In Pratchett, they’re something to be cautious of…” Both of which were in line with everything her father had taught her about the _real_ fae, which, to be fair, could be writ on the head of a pin with room left over for a sonnet or two.   “What about in your comics?” she managed. Why was he asking her about faeries? “I don’t know anything about Japanese fae - or, ah.  Their myths.”

“They’re not really faeries… well, not like anything _we’d_ call faeries. They’re more monsters and spirits and cursed objects and things like that. What kind of things they might do or what might keep them away depend on how Buddhist Japan was at the time the stories got popular, but it’s mostly ways into trapping them to do… what you want… um.”

“In general,” Cynara answered slowly, “my reading has suggested that Western Fae, at least, it’s not a good idea to attempt to trap them.  They tend to get cranky about such things.” She rolled her shoulders. “We’re nearly there. I think the owner of the barn — if you look over there, you can see a chimney, but there’s nothing else left of the house but bits of old stone foundation — was the nearest neighbor to the haunted house way back when.  Now there’s an abandoned house from the 80’s or so and an RV someone used to live in. And then the house.”

She was starting to feel both a little silly and a little weird.   _Fae_ weren’t supposed to be involved.  There wasn’t supposed to be a chance of a _real_ ghost.  And now, now she wasn’t sure how much of the stories she’d been telling herself — the noises in the attic, the way her father talked to the perimeter, the way the area around the house seemed to chase off even campers and hobos; it could all be coincidence, but she thought it sounded better if, like a couple people in town had suggested, the place was haunted — how much was a story and how much was real.

“I suppose it could have a _benign_ ghost,” she offered, looking at him sidelong.  She _thought_ he was just playing, too — except the moments that he clearly wasn’t — but, well, it wasn’t as if she knew him that well.  She cleared her throat, remembering the part of this she was really enjoying. “And if it is, and there’s nothing to fight, then I suppose I’ll have to find another battle for you to fight for me, my samurai.”

_Let’s keep this make believe.  Everything is safer if we don’t touch on the freaky and really weird, okay?_


	24. Duels

**Leofric**

She was just dramatizing for the whole haunted house… make-believe thing, Leofric was sure, but finding that diary entry about putting up hawthorn had him reading into everything. If the whole area had been completely unpopulated, just a bunch of empty fields, that would’ve been one thing. And Cynara was probably only mentioning the abandoned places on purpose - there wasn’t any reason for him to assume that was _really_ everything out there. There wasn’t any reason for him to think there was something actively driving people away.

He was thinking it anyway, of course. He couldn’t _help_ thinking of it. Maybe the past couple weeks had been a refreshing break, but he’d just been dropped head-first into a facsimile of faerie culture and left to swim or drown by the faculty for several months. The fact that he hadn’t been sitting paranoid at the edge of his seat waiting for someone several times his age to pop out of nowhere and--

“--then I suppose I’ll have to find another battle for you to fight for me, my samurai.”

His entire train of thought ground to a sudden halt. Like it was going along and just… ran out of track. No, like it reached the _end_ of the track and went flying through the train station after it, like that really famous crash.

The one corner of his mind that wasn’t floundering helplessly thought that this must be a side-effect of having been Kept recently; there was no way he would overreact this intensely otherwise. Right? It had to be.

“I, um.” He thought he might be blushing, too, just to make everything worse. _Calm down, moron, you’re playing a game, remember? You’re not a knight, there’s no ghost, calm the hell down, you’re probably freaking her out._ “I’ll be-- I will gladly fight any battles that you wish, ohime-sama.”

“What sort of battles do samurai have? There’s knight’s duels and chivalry and those sorts of things, but... I don’t really know *anything* about Japan, come to think of it.”

Leofric cleared his throat - he’d been doing that a lot this afternoon - not quite bringing himself to look at her yet. “Um, well. There’s bushido, which people usually translate as _way of the samurai_ , and that’s basically the samurai equivalent of chivalry. Honor and loyalty and obedience to your lord and all that. Duels, though…”

He frowned in thought, running through all the things he’d read or watched. “You might get a duel for personal honor, or for the honor of your lord - or lady,” he added, stumbling a little over it, “although that’s not, um, as historically accurate, and those would be to the death, a lot of the time, because surrender is dishonorable... A lot of Japanese warrior things involve dying,” he admitted.

“That’s good to know. I don’t think I’m ready to send you to your death quite yet.” There was something weird in her tone of voice that Leofric couldn’t identify, but a glance at her didn’t tell him anything either.

“Then I guess,” he answered with a smile that felt a little off, a little too… Zita-ish, “I’ll just make sure to win your battles. Let’s go find this ghost, Lady Cynara.”


	25. Ghosts

**Cynara**

She could get used to the sound of _Lady,_ if only it was a slightly less prickly name at the end of it.

Cya shook herself.   _Pull yourself together, girl._  If she kept this up — _not ready to send you to your death quite yet?_ What had she been thinking?

Talking about fae like they were real, going along with this haunted house quest without admitting that she’d actually seen something — she was forgetting everything her father had ever taught her about keeping secrets.   **And** she was freaking out the nice runaway — _the nice runaway would-be Samurai who's willing to go along with your make-believe —_ she amended.

_Her samurai_.

_Stop it!_

She smiled at Leofric and hoped it looked less conflicted than she was feeling. She _felt_ like she was snarling at the world, but she really just wanted to go find a hopefully-pretend ghost.

What were they _doing?_ She really ought to offer him an out, that would be the nice thing to do, but if she did that, well, he’d probably take it.

_If he wants to leave, all he has to do is say “you’re crazy, I’m out_ ,” _and walk away,_ she reminded herself.   _Nothing is holding him here but his own will._

She swallowed.  They were going to do this quest, and they were going to make it work.

Even if they really _did_ find a ghost.

“So, this way.”  She led him around the yard, through the former back gate, now a hole in the fence, the gate hanging off to the side,  through the weeds where nobody bothered to mow, and past another line of stones, almost a wall but not quite, that marked the part of the yard that someone had loosely hacked down to grass-height.  You could still see some of the old pavers sticking through the moss, though they mostly served now to make the path more uneven.

She turned to look at him. He looked as if he was still uneasy — possibly even more so — and doing his best to hide it.

What was she going to do?  She couldn’t just pretend that nothing was wrong forever.

She stopped and faced him, taking both his hands.  “Sir Leofric.” If she could just hold on to the game and stop freaking out, maybe they could both go back to having fun.  “We are almost to the goal of our quest.” She turned, releasing his right hand and holding on to his left - and hoping he was right-handed, although he probably wouldn’t _need_ to do do anything.  It was just polite. “And here is the house.”  She led him the remaining steps to the back door, because, well, the house looked slightly more haunted from the back - not that it looked good from the front.  “What the shopkeepers have told me is that it is a haven for evil spirits. What the local kids wrote on the shed -” She gestured at the shed that was built against the back wall, where _Killer House_ and _Devil’s Summer Shack_ had been spray-painted, along with a handful of various “occult”-like symbols, most of which were just nonsense.  “You can see why it seems a likely candidate for being haunted. But now, we enter.”

She tried the back door, though she knew it was unlocked, and let them in.  The back of the house held the kitchen, the only room she’d even started unpacking, a box and a hamper of her father’s clothes, and two rooms they hadn’t touched yet.

It didn’t really look all that haunted from this end, she had to admit.  But after the weird “clues” in the barn, she could handle that.


End file.
